Pixel perfect rendering

[Jonathan Tolentino]

Thanks to NobleFrugal Studio, he reignited my desire to use Opentoonz for sprite animation. With the use of the pencil toggle, we can make pixel animations with the robustness of Opentoonz animation and palette systems. As far as the process goes, we can make the pixel art in opentoonz.

Opentoonz is not known to be pixel perfect when it comes to rendering the output. It may be possible to use different resample balance, but that only helps if you scale the image to a high resolution. 

If this feature was added to have pixel perfect rendering, a market for using opentoonz for sprite art/animations would open up.

How difficult would it be to implement this feature? How much of a bounty would it take to do this?

[Tyrzin Paska Kynä]

"closest pixel" resample balance is the best for any sprite works that are purely made from toonz raster or raster images because it keeps all the pixels as they should be without causing any anti-aliasing, no matter the scaling, but when you use vector layers or plastic tool on any layer type, then it doesn't work which isn't ideal. So if you are not using the plastic tool or vector levels, then closest pixel option should work without problems.

[Rodney]

Something that occurred to me a few days ago with regard to antialiasing etc.and OpenToonz tendency to blur (or more likely premultiiply the the RGB image with the alpha channel is...

If premultiplication is a factor in pixel perfect rendering then wouldn't using an image format that doesn't have an alpha channel resolve the problem because there is no alpha channel in order to multiply into the RGB channels?

Just a thought.

I haven't been able to test much in that direction but wanted to add it into the mix.

[Jonathan Tolentino]

Please see a sample of a 100 x 100 pixel gif made in Opentoonz. The quality is decent, but not pixel perfect. It's good enough to do pixel art, but would just like perfect quality.

The attachment did not work, I have it on my twitter: https://twitter.com/Kuisone_/status/1029911928175579136

[Rodney]

Good news! 

There are some new pixel art options coming our way with the addition of... MyPaint brushes with Toonz raster levels.

Looking good!  :)

[Jonathan Tolentino]

You have a point! Tried using bmp format with a Toonz raster brush, and in paint it shows pixel perfect. On browsers it must be a rendering issue. Now if only I could get antialiasing on vectors to have 100% hardness..

*edit Thanks to setting the Sharpen FX to 99999, I can get pixel rendering. Now I can output the bmp files to another more specialized sprite animation program, but the dream of vector-based pixel animation is a reality now!

[Rodney]

I wanted to return to this topic because...

As of the latest nightly release (and soon the v1.6 release) there are some new options for gaining the aliased lines needed for pixel art... specifically for use with vector line work.  There is an opiton in Export Level but the results also appear during Preview and Rendering when the Nearest Neighbor is set.  This seems to be exactly what we have been looking for to get pixel art and animation out of Opentoonz.

Definitely give the latest nightly release a try.  :)